Big Microsoft News update brings ‘Video Hub,’ pinning topics to Start Live Tiles
Now the topics you care about are just a click (or tap) away.
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What you need to know
Microsoft News isn’t one of those apps that gets big updates often, but when it does, it does it with a bang. This week, the appreceived a major update on Windows 10that brings some helpful new features, whether you want to cruise through some video content or better keep up with specific topics.
The first major addition is a new “Video Hub,” accessible from the sidebar menu. The Video Hub serves up news clips from a variety of networks, autoplaying through them by default. Below the main feed, you’ll see a lengthy list of videos from news networks on other topics that you can easily add to your queue.
You can also quickly browse video content for specific topics, share videos, and reorder videos in your queue. As a bonus, Microsoft News can pop video out in a mini-player using picture-in-picture, so you can watch along while you get other work done.
Perhaps the coolest addition, however, is the ability to pin specific topics to the Start menu as a Live Tile. Microsoft News already had a Live Tile, but it would simply scroll through the top headlines regardless of topic. With topic tiles, you can now navigate to a specific topic you care about and create a tile that only shows headlines from that topic.
Microsoft also touched on the newweather widgetavailable in the “My News” section of the Microsoft News app. Going forward, the company says it plans to add a new “compact stories” view to News, which shrinks things down to let you take in headlines at a glance. The feature is currently in beta testing, though there’s no word on when it will be released.
These updates, with the exception of compact stories, are available now with the latest version of Microsoft News in the Microsoft Store.
The Microsoft News app serves up all of the latest headlines from around the world.
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Dan Thorp-Lancaster is the former Editor-in-Chief of Windows Central. He began working with Windows Central, Android Central, and iMore as a news writer in 2014 and is obsessed with tech of all sorts. You can follow Dan on Twitter@DthorpLand Instagram@heyitsdtl.
